We all must live with the choices we make. This is what we teach our kids, and we, the adults, should live our message. Today's walk-out by teachers in Oklahoma is about choices, not money. One could make the argument that in a state like West Virginia, where the economy has been in decline for [...]
I have an upcoming meeting with members of a school board to help them understand how strategic planning is evolving. There is so much to talk about, but I wanted to lay a foundation, so I challenged myself to put together about a ten slide, ten minute summary of what I think schools are doing [...]
Education is a mirror of societal interactions. For millennia, knowledge and information have been vastly more "push" than "pull". The big ideas of a few rulers, politicians, philosophers, celebrities, scientists, artists, authors, and the like have molded the evolution of human thought and action. In logarithmic terms, the 10 have led the 100,000, or perhaps [...]
The Walkout on school and gun violence yesterday was not political. It was a profound opportunity for learning. I deeply applaud every school leader who, regardless of opinions about gun ownership and the sources of violence in our country, both encouraged and allowed students to take advantage of this opportunity. Some school leaders did not, [...]
While we may differ on the best definition of the role of education, most of use probably agree that providing students the tools to seek truth during their lives is an important part of the mission of education. So, what do we do when falsity is winning the battle? A new study by three MIT [...]
Wayne Gretzky famously said. "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been". How about a corollary for schools: "Design schools for the future, not for today". This sounds embarrassingly obvious, yet it is not. This morning I read an article about the 11,000 student Carlsbad School District on the [...]
Penguins, icebergs, and organizational change, all in a one-hour read. What's not to love? John Kotter knows as much about change management as anyone in the world. I am embarrassed to say that I had not read Kotter until about two years ago, but perhaps that was actually good. I had to develop my own [...]
Are members of your school team struggling with HOW to change their classroom practices? The answer is "yes"; we all struggle with this, as many teachers teach the way they learned. We need to provide our teachers with the skills they need to be successful in a deeper learning model, particularly as we ask them [...]
Here's the problem: We can lose the future if we forget the past, but we can't win the future with the past as our guide. What does that mean? None of us really know, because for the first time in human history, the past is a decreasingly useful guide to what will work and not [...]
Four years ago when I published #EdJourney, I posited that significant changes at individual schools might take place over a period of 3-15 years, depending on leadership, intentionality, and focus. I have really never seen an example of significant change (other than in schools where a wolf is at the door) in the first year [...]
